Revit Platform Technical Note Discussion

[kyle.bernhardt]

Revit Community,
I've created this thread as a central location to discuss the recently released Technical Note on Best Practices for the Revit Platform. If this is news to you, check out my blog for more info.

Please post comments/questions that stem from this paper and we will try and get the right folks on our Product Teams to address them.

Let's try and focus the discussion on the document and not on future changes or other un-related discussions. You can always spawn a new thread for such questions.

Cheers,
Kyle B

[Gordon.Price]

Kyle,
thanks for the info. Should make for some good weekend reading.

On a different note, have you seen the More Cowbell app for the iPhone? It doesn't do much but make a bad cowbell sound as you tap the screen and occasionally say "I NEED more cowbell!" But I figured if anyone had downloaded it, you might have.

Best,
Gordon

[kyle.bernhardt]

Originally Posted by gordon.price

On a different note, have you seen the More Cowbell app for the iPhone? It doesn't do much but make a bad cowbell sound as you tap the screen and occasionally say "I NEED more cowbell!" But I figured if anyone had downloaded it, you might have.

I just have the Autodesk issue Blackberry, which to my knowledge does not have a Cowbell application. I do, however, have a More Cowbell application on my Facebook profile.

Cheers,
Kyle B

[russellh]

One thing that I started thinking about after reading the section on Remote Desktop Sharing, besides the fact that it does not really "recomend" anything, is the idea of using thin computing with Revit. Insead of having High powered desktops for each worker they would have a cheap terminal and access to a Blade PC to handle all of Revit's needs. That way when they are at the job site, remote office, or at home they can still access the power they need to work in revit and stay connected to the central file. It seems like a server/terminal system would work better for Revit especially when it goes to 64-bit because it could take advantage of other wise idle computing power. It might not cost less but it would be more flexable.

Just wondering if it would be better to remote to a desktop or Blade PC? Also would a Blade PC work well enough for in house use? Cluster computing anyone?

[GuyR]

Great document but why not make this a public document rather than by susbscription? Surely for those evaluating Revit this would be a very useful document to have available.

Cheers,

Guy

[ahauck]

Russell,

Thin client computing with Revit residing on blade PCs in a controlled data center is an interesting idea that may be worth exploring in connection with large and mobile teams. I'll be looking into available blade specifications as to see if the horsepower available looks practical for for executing the kind of projects that might require this workflow.

Thanks

Anthony Hauck
Revit Platform Manager

[ahauck]

Guy,

One of the benefits of subscription is early access to some white papers. We're considering a wider release later this year.

Anthony Hauck
Revit Platfrom Manager

[Marauder.X]

Time isn't necessarily something you are worried about, but I have deadlines. Consequently I like things that cut to the chase. Is there information that I can get that is mechanical specific?

[kyle.bernhardt]

Originally Posted by marauderx

Time isn't necessarily something you are worried about, but I have deadlines. Consequently I like things that cut to the chase. Is there information that I can get that is mechanical specific?

Yep, there's a whole section on Revit MEP.

Cheers,
Kyle B

[Gordon.Price]

Originally Posted by ahauck

Russell,

Thin client computing with Revit residing on blade PCs in a controlled data center is an interesting idea that may be worth exploring in connection with large and mobile teams. I'll be looking into available blade specifications as to see if the horsepower available looks practical for for executing the kind of projects that might require this workflow.

Thanks

Anthony Hauck
Revit Platform Manager

Anthony,
if Blades are being looked into, are Virtual solutions also? To my mind the biggest limitation of a Blade is that you still have to buy hardware to match the heaviest use a user will experience. I would image that VMs will soon be dynamic enough that RAM and CPUs can be added to the VM on the fly. So rather than every blade has to have X4 cores for rendering situations and 8Gb of RAM for large model situations, you could have a 16 core 64Gb box that hosts multiple VMs, which might start out a 2Gb X2 VMs, and pick up extra resources as needed. If the VM is hosted on a SAN, it would probably even be possible to dump a VM to another host when requested resources aren't available on the current physical host. Realtime dynamic resources could be huge for the office that does a variety of work, everyone renders occasionally, etc. No switching out hardware as people change tasks or projects, the hardware just adjusts to needs on the fly.

We can hope at least.

Gordon